Progress, With Shameful Lack of Pics

Soooo I've been plugging away at my Juggernaut and it's starting to look pretty decent. Sadly we managed to leave all the batteries for our camera at a different locale, so you'll just have to imagine how it's going in your heads for now. No, not posed like that you sick bastards. Honestly I can't take you anywhere.

I went with the 5th Border Legion colours, which is olive green with red trim. The paints I got for this were the Vellejo Model Colour's US Army Green, highlighting up to Yellow Green (or possibly Green Yellow).

I'm not gonna go on and bore you with more details while I don't have pretty pictures to show so I'll sign off for now. Hopefully have things to show soon!

Cha Cha Cha Chaaaaanges! Also: Warjacks.

As you may have noticed from my deliberately crude banner change (don't worry, it'll bug me after a few days and I'll do a proper redesign) this blog is undergoing some changes! Like for starters I'm posting an update OH SNAP SEE WHAT I DID THERE.

The long, dark tea time of my painting hobby is over as I have found new enthusiasm dear readers, and all because Vomkrieg basically got onto his hands and knees and with tears coursing down through his magnificently trimmed beard, begged me to take up Warmachine with him.*

And so here we are! Have some pictures.

This is Sorscha. Sorscha carries a huge hammer, wears a cool hat and is a hard bitten fantasy-Russian mage who can control giant steam powered death robots with her mind. Awesome huh? She also wears heels which is a bit dumb, but that's male game designers for you, sadly. 

This is the leader of my Manowar squad. They're huge hard-asses who walk around in steam powered armour, which can sometimes overheat and cook them alive. Of course they're too tough to worry about such trivial things! Swig back some more potato juice and tromp off through the snow to glory!

This is the Destroyer, one of my two heavy warjacks. I LOVE the redesigns of these models, which have a surprising amount of poseability. For this dude I wanted to give the impression of shuffling along, pausing to aim his canon to unleash ranged hell upon the enemy. To contrast with....

 ...this badass, the close combat Juggernaut. Arms outstretched in the classic 'come get some pain, you soon to be flattened bags of cat droppings', which sounds way cooler in Khadoran.

Aaaaand that's some of my starting force. Stay tuned for more Warmachine updates! There'll be painting! Custom transfers! Bad Russian accents! Death in the snow! For the Motherland!

PS: check out Gravitas' blog here. He got bored of waiting for me to get writing again and made his own place. It's so beautiful when they fly the nest.

*This may be a lie. More truthfully he snuck into my house in the witching hour each night and whispered things about steam powered death robots while hiding under my bed, his subliminal message slowly making its way into my waking thoughts. As one does.

Guest Post: Quick Naffatun step-by-step

What do you do when you've spent more than 24 hours and whole forests worth of carbon to travel to literally the other side of the planet to visit old friends?

Fresh air? What's that?

That's right, you sit inside and you paint tiny space men* with them.

Fair warning, this is just another step-by-step painting work in progress, so if you're not terribly interested in that please click anyway as I am terribly lonely and I get beaten if these posts don't get hits.

Guest Post: Ragiks against the machine

I swear, Infinity miniatures exist purely to make me feel like a terrible painter. I consider myself a mid-range painter, not golden demon worthy but able to implement standard techniques to get a passable result. But something about the Infinity line makes me feel like I'm a 12-year-old learning to drybrush again. I think it's the dynamic posing and realistic* scale, they really make you step up your game.

Plans! Also Happy 2012!

All packed apart from several sharp bits I trod on

Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great holiday season and didn't empty your wallets buying overpriced plastic space characters for slapping pigment onto and moving around a table while making 'pew pew!' noises.

Unless that's your thing of course.

I myself got a few more additions to the collection but am currently gearing up to move house, which has already involved packing up the study and everything in it. This effectively means that I won't be doing much (if any) painting until the start of February, so in the meantime I'll make a few posts here and there about things that catch my eye and hopefully also pressgang Gravitas and some others into a guest post or five.

Also. Also! My project for this year that I would like to set myself is a modest diorama. Nothing huge or too fancy because frankly I'm going to be having a lot on my plate this year with work and postgrad studies, but I think something fun with the boys in blue and some orks is definitely doable. I already have some ideas about a small urban scene, possibly an ambush of some kind in an alley.

Sooo yeah. I shall be reading your posts, making the appropriate ooh and aaah noises at your pretty pictures, and soon enough will be adding my own once again. Happy painting.

Back Later, But First...

Baggies: also for modelling stuff.

Well I've been a bit slack what with some foot related setbacks and being distracted by other projects and not being bothered to blog-ness.

BUT SEE AN UPDATE.

As you can see to the left, quite a while ago I received some cool bits and pieces from the good folk at Armourcast. They specialise in neat little extra bits for your super space soldier* models, such as cinematic gun flashes, transfers and even missile launched hamsters.

The Gibson Slums Ambush- an Infinity battle report

Lt. Sevens hunkered down on the old watchtower's rusted roof and watched the car descend from the steel-grey sky to touch down on the landing pad on the low concrete plinth below, trusting in her armor's optic baffles to hide her from unfriendly eyes. Her Corredigor Intrusion Cell had arrived hours before the scheduled drop, and waited for their contact another hour past the agreed time. Now his car had arrived, but something definitely stunk. With a click of her tongue she increased the zoom on her visor, focusing on the tinted windshield.. and the empty seats beneath.

"Remote operated" she muttered, already signalling the alert to her team when the first flicker of movement entered her peripheral vision. The arms deal might have gone south, but with any luck one of the Pan-O zombies trying to ambush her team would survive long enough to point out a juicy local target or two...

Week Off

Image blatantly stol I mean borrowed from GW! 

Howdy peeps. So the last week has been pretty rough due to coming off the pain medication that I've been on for the last three months, and I'm still a bit dizzy and tend to fall over and walk into trees a lot. So I'm taking a week off from this space marine blogging lark and will be back when I feel able to pick up a paint brush without my toes dropping off.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with the soothing sounds of the Codex Approved Battle Hymn No. 34: "Die Choking On Your Own Blood, Alien Filth". *

*You'll  have to imagine it. 

Paper or Plastic?

There's a wide range of wargames scenery available out there, a large majority of which is unpainted plastic or resin in a "future gothic"* or "generic fantasy" style. But sometimes that just don't cut it.

I'm pretty sure I used to live in this part of London.

Sometimes you need a dirty near-future setting where people call each other "choomba" in gritty voices, and claim that they never asked to be turned into totally awesome cyborg killing machines. Sometimes you don't have the room, time or storage space for gigantic, multi-part, flock covered terrain monstrostities.

This seems legit.

Time to grab those snips and get to papercrafting.

Blingtastic

I rollin', they hatin'

While fixing up the bases of my troops I decided that First Sergeant Kalistus needed to be blinged up a bit more, in keeping with the Ultramarine's magpie-like love of shiny things.

Unfortunately I'd managed to well and truly screw up the remaining banner by pouring a bunch of superglue all down the front, giving it a really rugged texture in places. I fixed this by hiding the damage (after smoothing it as best I could with a knife and file) with an etched brass eagle piece, after seeing a great looking model using the same banner technique on Bolter and Chainsword.

I found working with etched brass on curved surfaces to be just as easy as promised on the daytime TV informercials starring Cliff Richard. It bent into the banner shape very smoothly and sat nice and flat when glued into place.

It also took paint very well.

His iron halo was simply incorporated into the banner, nothing earth shattering there.

I also gave him an unpainted brass piece on the front, and used an aquila piece to give his base some more oomph. I think the final look is pretty good, he certainly stands out and looks more blingalicious now. You can practically hear him jingle as he walks.